6 Ideas To Boost Your Content Marketing with Webinars in 2017

In this post I will share with you some ideas fro webinar formats to boost your content marketing strategy in 2017.

Recently, as I was searching for great examples of webinars I could showcase and I noticed something interesting. A lot of them were not sales or customer training webinars but content marketing webinars.

Those brands were creating some genuine live content just like they would do on their blog. They were not selling their platform, just talking about their field expertise.

The paradigm of content marketing webinars is very different from classic sales or customer success webinars:

Your position as a brand is very different. You're not supposed to sell your solution but to create awareness around the problem you're solving.

Another interesting thing about content marketing webinars is the recycling potential. You can bridge your webinars with your video marketing strategy, your blog, or even external platforms like Slideshare.

In this post I will show you:

3 new webinar formats for you content marketing strategy

3 actionable ideas to repurpose your past webinars

3 Content Marketing Webinar Ideas

In this part, I will not give topic ideas since every industry needs to come up with their own. However, I will cover some formats worth experimenting.

Finding Topic Ideas

If you're out of creativity, you have data on your side. Every time I need some inspiration for a blog or a webinar I go to the following sources:

Google Analytics > Most viewed pages

Customer live chat and/or customer tickets

Keyword research on Adwords Keyword Planner Tool

Quora questions in your industry

The first two are interesting if you're want to connect the dots between your content and your solution. But remember, you should be talking about the problem you're solving not the solution. Try to spot the main concerns of your visitors and customers.

The last two are more interesting in my opinion because they guarantee that you will create some relevant top of the funnel content and, at the same time, build ranking opportunities. They require more of research though.

1. Live Industry Review Video Podcast

Lot of startups, like Chartmogul or Drift, nowadays are hosting short podcasts. Podcast seems to be a thing among startups now.

Podcasts are great but, by definition, they're asynchronous and not live.

We tried doing them live with SaaSCast. Instead of recording it and publish it after, we would do the opposite: publish first and let people join the conversation.

The best part was that the discussion was spontaneous and the audience was bringing a significant value to the debates.

The idea of this format is simple. Create a small circle of hosts: your team, friends, industry experts. Gather around a table, and just hangout.

However, this format has strong cons: you will need to prepare each episode's script, keep a strict planning and build great set.

2. Industry Expert Interviews

This is an "easier" format to build when you run a small team. It requires only two people behind a webcam and make them discuss on a given topic.

It's also easier to prepare: like any other interview, you will have to come up with questions for you guest. But eventually, you will let them do the talking, you will be here to lead the conversation.

This is the kind of interview podcast that could be also hosted as a live interview.

You can even do user generated interviews, meaning you don't have to come up with most of your questions: you let your audience do the heavy lifting.

3. Live Tutorials

By "tutorial" I don't mean about your product, but on a use case. This is a great way to create content if you offer a technical solution, like a framework or an API.

Take a look at the Chrome Developer YouTube Channel. They're doing an amazing job at creating meaningful, actionable content around web development best practices.

What? No trolls in the YouTube comments section? That must be a first. People are loving it!

Technical solutions like Algolia or Contentful could easily host live screencasts on building a basic search engine or hosting an API. Same goes for Sketch or Adobe.

But I believe that all the industries have some industry knowledge (non-product related) they could share.

3 Ideas to Repurpose Your Webinar Content

Now that you have some webinar ideas or even hosted webinars, you might wonder how you can expand the reach of this content and make the most of it.

Of course, you can upload your recording to a YouTube Channel

1. Reuse Your Slides

If you had slides for your webinars you can post them on Slideshare. Then include those slides in some relevant blog posts.

Make sure to work your SEO for Slideshare:

Fill all the details

Include relevant keywords

Add the video of the webinar at the end of the Slideshare, slides with video tend to rank better.

Pro tip: add links and CTA after the 3rd slide to make sure they're clickable.

2. Transcript & Cross-Post

Sounds obvious, but having a transcript will enable your webinar to resonate at the SEO level. Think about it: you have generated a 1000+ words piece of content around a well-researched topic with high-value keywords.

Two options: either you do the transcript yourself or you can pay for it. It's up to you. I know that the people at Moz use Speechpad for their Whiteboard Friday.

Now that you have your transcript, make sure to post it first to your blog and optimize it for ranking. After that, find relevant places to post extracts or the whole post: Quora, Medium, etc. Don't forget to link back.

3. Gated Premium Content

You hosted webinar with a top-level industry expert? Why not uploading it to your content library and put it behind a form. Put your old content at work for you, transform it in a lead magnet.

Also, if you hosted multiple webinars on the same topic, consider put them together inside an e-book. Transcript and concatenate.

Conclusion

Long story short, webinars should be limited to sales and customer training. You content marketing can also benefit from it. As well as your brand. Create a nice format that resonates with your audience and spread the content around via emails, blog posts, third party platforms etc.